Raven Raves, Rants, Reviews and Listings

John Amen’s More of Me Disappears

Review by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Cross-Cultural Communications, 2005—ISBN: 0-89304-888-7—104 pages. $12.00

John Amen’s second collection of poems takes us on a journey through the poet’s inner and outer landscapes – images of war and destruction from several eras juxtaposed against specific, highly personal suffering. Moments of wit interspersed throughout reassure us that the poet maintains a sense of humor and self-deprecation in the face of despair. Amen’s style ranges from straight-forward to surreal, from lyric narrative verse to prose poem, and sometimes these swings take place in the same piece. A feeling of displacement, discomfort and loss, confusion and alternate flashes of light and darkness suffuse the writing in More of Me Disappears.

In the first section, recurring references to World War II and the Holocaust arise along with more modern scenes of decay and horror, and the speakers shift. Two important poems central to this section are “Verboten,” in which a child questions older relatives about their experiences with the Holocaust, and is told that some things should not be questioned, and “Meanwhile,” which evokes other horrors of the era. One of my favorite poems in the section was the touching “Angelica Tells Her Story,” a persona poem in which a woman grieves for what has been lost and for her memory, which she worries will be lost as well. Here are a few lines:

I remember my old town as you remember an eccentric aunt…
I grieve for my sister, still chained to the storm in her gray pulp;
my mother, who died looking out a window; my father,
who left behind account books…
…I want to remember
where I come from. If I forget, please, will you remind me?

The second section seems to revolve around a search for a lost mother figure, best expressed in the prose poem “Five,” in which the speaker compares the splintered memory of his parents to a film missing sections. On a lighter note, I really enjoyed another prose poem in this section, “At First,” which seems to be a parody of the discovery of a fifties screen goddess and the search for God. Here are a few excerpted lines from this piece:

…You stood at the top of the stairs like a heroine in a B–movie. I watched you as the piano moaned under my fingers. “Is this an audition?” I yelled. The celebrities wept in unison. “Namaste,” they chanted…You were gone, your white dress drooped across the banister, a trace of you shimmering in the fluorescent light. It would be lifetimes before I would see you again.

The third section has an eerie, apocalyptic tone, continuing the threads of drug use, godlessness, and people lost in urban landscapes that appeared in the first two sections. In “Narcissism” the speaker describes his attempts to save drug-addicted women, in “Biography of a Bottom,” a young man has a crisis of faith (and possibly, sanity) as he wanders seedy streets.

One unifying element in the three sections is the multiple speakers’ search for God, a quest that begins the book (in “The Consummation,” a poem about creation mythology) and ends the book. The last poem, “Before I Leave,” which, with chilling finality, declares:

Already I see myself turning into salt
in the doorway of 2006. The country
is blowing up…
…I’ll wear a tuxedo to our next festival of mud.
Shalom. Halleluiah. May your Armageddons be fruitful.

The melancholy and anger in the poet’s search echoes throughout this collection, in which hope almost always finds a dead-end. The shadow of multiple wars hangs heavily over the poems in this book, as the disenfranchised search for voices and truth. The imagery, while heady and vibrant, is disorienting and charged with menace. Amen drags the reader head-first through a jumble of highly personal nightmare, dysfunctional dystopia, and curious insight, while introducing the possibility of beauty in lyrical snippets.